The following figure gives an overview of an X4 series Ethernet adapter. All X4 series adapters are similar, but some might not provide all features that are shown.
Figure 1. X4 Series Overview
X4 series Ethernet adapters have two separate datapaths:
- Enterprise datapath
- This provides a similar feature set to SFN8000 series and X2 series Ethernet adapters, with increased resources compared to previous generations.
- Express datapath
- This is developed from the X3 series Ethernet adapter architecture, and provides the lowest possible latency.
The datapath in use is set by the host software that is sending or receiving the traffic:
- Kernel traffic always uses the Enterprise datapath.
- Applications using AMD Solarflare acceleration technologies such as Onload, TCPDirect, and ef_vi can select which datapath to use, depending on their requirements.